Sound Test Online — Free Check

A sound test answers the fastest audio question there is: is anything actually coming out of each side? This page plays a 1 kHz reference tone on one side or on both at once, generated live with the Web Audio API. Nothing is recorded, nothing is uploaded, and no sound starts until you press a button.

How to use it

The signal path is short by design: choose a channel, play one tone, and confirm which side you hear it on.

1. Choose the output and a moderate level. In the transport bar, select your speakers or headphones in the output device picker, keep the volume slider around 30-50%, and confirm the sample-rate readout (48.0 kHz is typical).
2. Select a channel. Press Left, Both or Right. The readout updates immediately: Channel shows the selection and Frequency shows 1.00 kHz.
3. Press Play Channel. A 1.5-second sine at 0.3 linear gain, about -10.5 dBFS, plays with a 15 ms attack and a 60 ms release so there is no click at either end.
4. Listen to which side speaks. The result line names the active channel in text, for example “Playing Left channel”, so the check still works when you are guiding someone else remotely.
5. Repeat for the other channel and for Both. Both sends the identical tone at equal level down both channels, and it should land in the center.
6. Stop early if you need to. The Stop button silences the tone immediately, and the transport Stop and Mute buttons affect anything else the page is playing.
7. Check the level meter. It shows the digital level of the tone being generated. If the meter moves but you hear nothing, the fault sits downstream of the browser.

Fast triage order

Work through five checks in order and stop at the first failure. One, channel: select Left and Right in turn and confirm each side exists. Two, tone: if both sides work, play Both and confirm a single centered image at 1 kHz. Three, identity: the tone labelled Left must come out of the left ear or the left speaker. Four, volume: if both sides play but one is quieter, compare the OS balance slider, the amplifier or speaker trim, and the driver. Five, connection type: repeat the check on wired output. If only Bluetooth fails, the fault is in the wireless path rather than in the test signal.

What you hear	Likely cause	Next step
Silence on both sides	Muted tab or transport, wrong output device, or a suspended audio context	Unmute, reselect the device, press Play again
One side silent	Dead driver, unplugged cable, broken jack contact, or a balance slider panned hard over	Swap the plug and the headphone cups, then retest
Tone on the wrong side	Reversed speaker cables, a mirrored headphone jack, or a channel swap in the OS	Check the wiring, then run the speaker test
Both sides play, one quieter	Balance or pan setting, potentiometer tracking, or a partly damaged driver	Center the balance, then compare again at a higher volume
Both sounds hollow or phasey	Out-of-polarity speaker wiring or a virtual surround effect	Disable spatial processing, then run the stereo perception test
Clicks, stutter or dropouts	Bluetooth buffering, CPU load, or a power-saving audio driver	Retest wired before blaming the speakers

Left, right and both

The Left and Right buttons hard-pan the tone with the Web Audio StereoPannerNode, at -1.00 and +1.00, so exactly one channel is active. That is the quickest way to catch a dead driver, a broken TRS contact, a reversed cable or an operating-system balance setting, because only one acoustic path is live at a time. The Both setting pans to 0.00 and uses the equal-power law, so the tone arrives at equal level in both channels and should image between your ears on headphones or between the speakers on a desk. A correct stereo setup produces one stable phantom center; a system with inverted polarity on one side produces a hollow, spread or oddly wide center that the stereo perception test can confirm.

Why 1 kHz for 1.5 seconds

1 kHz falls near the peak sensitivity of human hearing, so a low-level tone is easy to perceive and easy to localise. It is the usual choice for channel and level checks because it survives small speakers and lossy codecs far better than a low tone would. The 1.5-second burst is long enough to identify pitch and direction, and short enough to avoid sustained exposure or listener fatigue. The ramped envelope removes the click that would otherwise be mistaken for a fault, and the tone is generated fresh in the browser, so the test does not depend on a downloaded file, a codec or a network connection.

Accuracy, limits and troubleshooting

• Everything is digital. The readout and meter are in dBFS relative to digital full scale; the page cannot report dB SPL without a calibrated microphone and a known reference.
• The page cannot detect swapped cables on its own. It knows which channel it panned, and only you can hear which ear received it.
• OS mono settings force both channels to carry the same signal. If Left and Right sound identical, check Mono Audio in your accessibility settings first.
• Some Windows audio drivers apply enhancements such as loudness equalisation or virtual surround that alter channel placement. Disable them for a clean check.
• Bluetooth codecs can delay or merge channels, and some earbuds run their own spatial processing. Test wired to isolate the browser path.
• The level meter shows the generated digital signal, not the acoustic output, so a moving meter with no sound points at the device, the cable or the driver.
• If one side stays inaudible on known-good wired headphones and a different device, treat that as a screening signal rather than a diagnosis and see an audiologist.

Related tools

• Speaker Test — Check channel assignment, wiring polarity and phase on desk or hi-fi speakers.
• Headphone Test — Verify headphone channel sides, balance and low-frequency tracking.
• Earbud Test — Run the same channel checks on in-ear models, where fit affects level.

Aliases covered on this page: sound test, left right sound test, stereo sound test, and speaker channel test.